The Magical Chorus

a distorted and truncated form, of such intense inculcation into the masses from above. The result was a half- century cult of Mayakovsky’s personality and work that the poet could have only dreamed about. The paradox is that this canonization also marked the end of any real participation of actual avant-garde art in the country’s cultural development.

As Stalin had undoubtedly planned, a frontal attack on “formalism” in culture was initiated in 1936. Formalism was defined by the authoritative Soviet Short Literary Encyclopedia as “an aesthetic tendency expressed in a disparity between form and content and the absolutization of the role of form.”¹ In practice, the word was used as a political label to suppress the slightest deviation from the current party line in culture, both in Stalin’s lifetime and for many years after his death.

It would be hard to find an outstanding Soviet writer, poet, artist, director, or composer who at some point, somewhere, was not accused by someone at least once of the sin of formalism. They repented of the sin just as ritually, almost mechanically.

The antiformalist campaign of 1936 began with the infamous editorial whose title, “Muddle Instead of Music,” has become a symbol of the state’s diktat in the cultural sphere. It appeared in Pravda, the country’s main newspaper, on January 28 and was most probably written or dictated by Stalin.² The editorial brutally criticized the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, based on a story by Nikolai Leskov, which was written by the young composer Dmitri Shostakovich and had been running with great success for two years in Leningrad, before Stalin heard it on January 26, 1936, at a performance of the Bolshoi Theater’s annex in Moscow.

Stalin left the theater enraged by this “tragedy-satire,” as the composer named it, about a provincial merchant’s wife, Katerina Izmailova, who kills her husband and father-in-law to be with her lover and commits suicide on the way to a prison camp in Siberia. He expressed his indignation in the Pravda editorial: “The listener from the very first minute is stunned by the opera’s intentionally unharmonious muddled flow of sounds. Snatches of melody, embryos of musical phrases drown, escape, and once again vanish in rumbling, creaking, and squealing. To follow this ‘music’ is difficult, to remember it impossible.”

But Stalin would not have been the effective politician he was if he had not used a concrete excuse (in this case, his real irritation with Shostakovich’s expressionist music and macabre plot) to let the urban intelligentsia know that the time of comparative tolerance of avant-garde culture, which could be called the “Lunacharsky era,” was over once and for all. “The danger of this tendency in Soviet music is clear. Leftist ugliness in opera is growing from the same source as leftist ugliness in painting, poetry, pedagogy, and science. Petty bourgeois ‘innovation’ is leading to a gap away from true art, science, from true literature.” For those who were slow on the uptake, Stalin warned quite unambiguously: “This is playing at esoteric things, which can end very badly.”³

First to hand, Shostakovich got battered two more times by Pravda: in an editorial on February 6, “Ballet Falsehood” (aimed at his colossally successful comic ballet at the Bolshoi Theater about kolkhoz life, The Limpid Stream) and on February 13 in another unsigned article (“Clear and Simple Language in Art”), which once again attacked Shostakovich’s opera and ballet: “Both these works are equally far from the clear, simple, and truthful language in which Soviet art must speak.”⁴

At the same time, Pravda fired an entire antiformalist volley, printing another four editorials between February 13 and March 9 with threatening headlines: “A Crude Scheme Instead of Historical Truth”(about film), “Cacophony in Architecture,” “About Blotting Artists,” and “External Glitter and False Contents” (about dramatic theater). Stalin’s ideas on the fate of the avant-garde were coming to pass; back in 1932, in a conversation with a culture functionary, Ivan Gronsky, he said, “The nonsense with these fashionable tendencies in art has to be ended.”

Unexpectedly for Stalin, Maxim Gorky, whom he had elevated so high, came out against the antiformalist attack. The dictator had expected Gorky to be his ally in this matter: the idea, after all, was “to banish crudity and savagery from every corner of Soviet life,” as it was put in “Muddle Instead of Music.” Stalin and Gorky both believed that Russia, that backward agrarian country with a population that was mostly illiterate, had to be made kulturny in the shortest time possible. The achievement of collectivization and industrialization, a top priority for Bolsheviks, was impossible without such forced “acculturation.”

The fate of the hapless Russian peasantry, caught in these catastrophic developments, did not worry Gorky as much as the vicissitudes of the “leading proletariat” and the urban intelligentsia. He also needed to maintain his reputation as the “great humanist” in Europe, where Gorky’s influential friends, like Romain Rolland and Andre Malraux, were voicing alarm about the treatment of Shostakovich and other “formalists”(the peasants were of much less concern for the French as well).

That is why Gorky reacted quite nervously to Stalin’s antiformalist pogrom. In the middle of March 1936, Gorky wrote a terse letter to Stalin, which was basically a demand that he disavow the attacks on Shostakovich in Pravda. The secret police also reported to Stalin that “Gorky is very displeased by discussions of formalism.”

Despite the prevalent view in our day of Stalin as a one-track tyrant, he knew how to maneuver when it suited him. He cut off the attack on Shostakovich and supported his 1937 Fifth Symphony, characterizing it (anonymously, again) as a “businesslike creative response of a Soviet artist to just criticism.”⁵ For Stalin this was a tactical (and rather humiliating) retreat, which he avenged more than a decade later.

Stalin came to power bolstered by many qualities needed by a successful politician: inhuman energy and capacity to work; the ability to comprehend and formulate the essence of a social problem, to understand the emotion of the masses and direct it as needed; the knack for maneuvering, biding his time, pitting his opponents against one another, and coolly choosing the right moment for getting rid of them and destroying them.

Yet there was one quality that is quite desirable in the leader of an influential European state with planetary ambitions, as the Russian empire had traditionally been (and also was in its incarnation as the Soviet Union), that Stalin lacked: international experience. Unlike Lenin and his comrades-in-arms, much less the high officials of tsarist Russia, Stalin had never spent much time abroad and was not acquainted with the Western political and cultural elite.

Trotsky maintained that when Stalin met with Westerners, he demonstrated the “insecurity and shyness of a provincial who does not speak foreign languages and is lost when dealing with people he cannot order about and who do not fear him.”⁶ We know of a private remark by Maxim Litvinov, Commissar of Foreign Affairs, about Stalin’s foreign policy: “He doesn’t know the West…. If our enemies were a few shahsor sheiks, he would outsmart them.”⁷ Litvinov underestimated his boss. Tricked by Hitler, Stalin won in the end, and in dealing with such giants as Churchill and Roosevelt, he showed himself to be at least their equal in international maneuvering. The road to this intellectual parity was not an easy one for Stalin, but he was a good student, mastering the lessons and advice of people with a wider worldview, knowledge of languages, and European connections, such as Lenin and other old party leaders with emigre experience.

It is also obvious that Gorky was an excellent advisor for Stalin. Lenin had told Gorky: “It is always stimulating speaking with you, since you have a more varied and wider set of impressions.” It was through Gorky that Stalin made personal contact with the luminaries of European culture. Here is an interesting chronology: June 29, 1931, Stalin met George Bernard Shaw; December 13, Emil Ludwig, a popular German writer at the time; August 4, 1933,